A Series of Unfortunate Events Book 1

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“THE BAD BEGINNING”A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicketfor more e-books, visit www.intexblogger.comBook 01

*
A Series Of Unfortunate Events * BOOK
the First THE
BAD BEGINNING by
LEMONY SNICKET HarperCollinsPublishers

To
Beatrice-- darling,
dearest, dead. Chapter
One If
you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better
off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy
ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in
the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the
lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire
were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful,
and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky,
and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune,
misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how
the story goes. Their
misfortune began one day at Briny Beach. The three Baudelaire children
lived with their parents in an enormous mansion at the heart of
a dirty and busy city, and occasionally their parents gave them permission
to take a rickety trolley-the word “rickety,” you probably know,
here means “unsteady” or “likely to collapse”-alone to the seashore,
where they would spend the day as a sort of vacation as long
as they were home for dinner. This particular morning it was gray and
cloudy, which didn't bother the Baudelaire youngsters one bit. When
it was hot and sunny, Briny Beach was crowded with tourists and it
was impossible to find a good place to lay one's blanket. On gray and
cloudy days, the Baudelaires had the beach to themselves to do what
they liked. Violet
Baudelaire, the eldest, liked to skip rocks. Like most fourteen-year-olds,
she was righthanded, so the rocks skipped farther across
the murky water when Violet used her right hand than when she used
her left. As she skipped rocks, she was looking out at the horizon and
thinking about an invention she wanted to build. Anyone who knew Violet
well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was

tied
up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for
inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with
images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted
by something as trivial as her hair. This morning she was thinking
about how to construct a device that could retrieve a rock after
you had skipped it into the ocean. Klaus
Baudelaire, the middle child, and the only boy, liked to examine creatures
in tide-pools. Klaus was a little older than twelve and wore glasses,
which made him look intelligent. He was intelligent. The Baudelaire
parents had an enormous library in their mansion, a room filled
with thousands of books on nearly every subject. Being only twelve,
Klaus of course had not read all of the books in the Baudelaire library,
but he had read a great many of them and had retained a lot of
the information from his readings. He knew how to tell an